00:49:03 · Isaiah Taylor
[00:49:03] S1: One example, you know, that I'll give is to credit my nuclear review team here, my nuclear licensing team. You know, this is a hard thing to do, like, going from a patch of dirt in September to a nuclear plant ready to make power sitting here in July is an enormous challenge, and it's and it's especially big because we actually have power operations that we're planning for here, and it's not a DOE. It didn't start as a DOE site, and so there's all these layers of complexity that have to come through. And a couple months ago, we realized that, know, again, I think it was like in a stand up, we started asking like, okay, what's critical back to this, what's critical back to that, and we started to realize that there's this area of our licensing process like nobody really had a good understanding of. And so we started to pull on that thread and pull on that thread, and within about an hour, we realized that there was a huge gaping hole in our our work product that was imminently due in order to stay on timeline. And so we called a war room. There is a a trailer just over there. So if you walk, like, 200 feet that way, there's, like, a construction trailer. And we said, clear out the trailer, set up chairs, set up a screen, and call in everybody who is not working on hardware critical path, people who have nothing to do with the nuclear operation, people who, you know, have nothing to do with engineering, people who are working in accounting, our photographer, like literally everybody, we are all going to sit in this room and we are just not going to stop working on this problem and asking the question of how do we solve the next problem until it is done. And the people who have no context on the plant, they're not gonna be able to answer the technical questions, they're gonna be able to coordinate, right, and they're going to be able to say, has this question been answered, have we really understood what the regulation is saying here, Can we find somebody who knows the answer to that question? And it was over a weekend. I made this call on a... I think it was a Friday morning, and the war room wrapped up on a Tuesday morning. So, yeah, it's it's a maniacal search of truth and then being willing to do unreasonable things to fix problems.
00:51:20 · Ty Morse, Isaiah Taylor
[00:51:20] S0: This morning we were driving in your car and I was kind of talking with you about like urgency and timelines and being maniacally urgent. And I really believe that if you look at someone like Elon, he's effectively this injector of urgency in all of his companies. He like unfucks bottlenecks and injects urgency. [00:51:39] S1: Yep. [00:51:40] S0: So with this sort of thing, how are you thinking about like, injecting as much urgency as possible Yeah. In the right places?
00:51:47 · Isaiah Taylor
[00:51:47] S1: Yeah. Elon is, like, probably the greatest to ever do this. Right? Like, he he gets... He injects urgency into things that are not even his. Right? Like, when he just sort of gets into an industry or gets into an area, things just start moving faster because he's able to just, like, show people that you can move faster. I think that's one of the most useful talents in the world and one of the most useful skills in the world. Because the fact is, if you boil down the work of any project in every company, if you could attack every single one of those tasks, right, imagine this, you could list out every single piece of work that has to get done in order to go to the moon, let's say. And you could list those out, and you could attack each one with fresh urgency and fresh energy. You could compress timelines to a degree that I don't think most people really know or understand. Right? And so the goal is how do you, like, do you build an organization that does that naturally? And I think there's a certain extent to which no organization will do that perfectly, but honestly, it's just a lot of what we hire for, and it's a lot of, like, why people join Valar. Like, lot of people join Valar because they've been... They've they've loved nuclear for a long time. They think that nuclear is the right way to re industrialize The United States. They think that it's the only way that we're going to, you know, be able to get cheap power back in The US. Maybe they're doing it because they want to stop carbon emissions from continuing to raise the PPM level and they care about climate change, whatever the reason is for joining the company, they know that Valar is the place that they will be able to run as fast as they can, and that they'll be surrounded by people who are trying to move as fast as they can. This is one of the, I think, the least replicable and hardest to change aspects of a company's culture. You can fix many different things about a company culture, you can make the marketing better, you can even increase the talent of the engineering team, you can fix your finances, you can make your FP and A processes better. But pace is, I think, one of the only things that you can't change about a company, and or at least let's say that you can't improve about a company. You can certainly make it worse. You can take a high paced company and make it slow.
00:54:04 · Isaiah Taylor, Ty Morse
It's very, very hard to make a slow moving company fast. I would argue nine times out of 10, it's easier to start a whole new company than to try to take a slow moving company and make it fast. So it's just, you know, it's something that we take extraordinarily seriously. It's something that we hire for. It's a reason that people come to us. [00:54:24] S0: Is there anything specific on the kind of company level that enables the team to be designed in a way where they can, you know, move with extreme urgency and speed?
00:54:34 · Isaiah Taylor
[00:54:34] S1: Yeah. So one of these things, again, we we have custom software for this, actually, that we've designed around giving the entire company visibility into what is the most important work at any given time. We have a screen up in our office that shows in big red letters what is the most important work in the company at every given time. Now, of course, all the work in in the company is important. This is, I think, one of one of the reasons that companies don't like talking about the critical path. They they fear that if you're always talking about the critical path, then all the other work will will get undone and people won't think it's as important. And, actually, the critical path changes so much that, like, that's not a big deal because people will be like, okay. Maybe I'm not critical path today, but I probably will be tomorrow because that team is gonna go fix that problem. They're gonna figure out how to move faster. So that's one big thing. The other thing is like we just culturally talk about it constantly. And I like to do this by thinking about the future state that I care about. Right? I want Valar to be in a position where we are turning on nuclear reactors every hour. Right? So I wanna turn on 24 reactors a day. And if I'm going to turn on 24 reactors a day, what needs to be true for that to happen, and what's stopping us? Right? And if you think about it that way, it starts to become clear what's stopping us. Right? Well, what's stopping us is like, we don't even know how to turn on one. Like, oh, okay, well, how do we turn on one? Well, we don't have a site. Okay, well we need to get a site. Right? We don't have a, you know, a reactor standing there in thermal testing. Okay, well we need to get a reactor in thermal testing as fast as we can. Well you need to get a reactor in thermal testing, well, I mean the hardest part of that's probably gonna be the circulation system and the pressure system and the control rod drive units. So we should probably go get that system designed and in fabrication as fast as we possibly can. Oh, the machine shops in LA take too long to go and make these parts? Well, you better have a $2,500,000 machine shop standing there in a month. Right? Okay. So there's the critical path to, you know, where we were about eighteen months ago. So, yeah, and like, a a huge part of this is it really is cultural.
00:56:39 · Isaiah Taylor, Ty Morse
The whole the whole team and the whole company has to think this way all the time, and it's very uncomfortable. It's weird to think this way. You wanna just think in in your own box. You wanna think in waterfalls, but you have to think holistically. Everyone has to think about the whole company and what is going to make us move the fastest. [00:56:57] S0: Initially, you were going to go to The Philippines and build some reactor out there, and then suddenly Trump gets elected, bring nuclear back to America. And then at the same time, data centers absolutely start ripping and AI takes off. What was it like kind of going through that transition inside the company? And how did you kind of like reset your own North Star in order to make sure that it was aligned?